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Graphics Card
reviews are probably the most regularly covered
material that we produce here at Hot
Hardware. Perhaps that is because there is
an almost dizzying array of manufacturers to
choose from. Regardless, Elsa has been known
in the market for quite some time as a quality
Graphics Card vendor with years of experience (15+
to be specific) in design and manufacturing.
In addition, keeping pace with 3D graphics
technology, Elsa releases products with every 6
month new release that the graphics chipset giant
NVidia, can dish out. This is our take on
Elsa's latest NVidia driven Gladiac. Powered
by the new GeForce2 GTS and 32MB of DDR SDRAM, the
Gladiac is targeted at the "Hard Core
Gamer". Let's see if it has the guts to
keep up.
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- Graphics
Controller: NVIDIA
GeForce2 GTS GPU
- 200MHz.
Core Clock Speed
- Integrated
Transforms and Lighting
- Per
pixel shading and dual texturing
- Full
Scene hardware anti-aliasing,
multi-texturing, procedural texturing
- Environmental
mapping, bump mapping, shadow stenciling
- Bilinear,
Trilinear and 8-tap anistropic texture
filtering
- 1.6
GigaTexels per second
- RAMDAC/Pixel
Cycle: 350
MHz
- Memory:
32MB
or 64MB DDR RAM - 333MHz. DDR
- Bus
Systems: AGP
2x/4x
- Standards:
DPMS,
DDC2B, Plug & Play
- Optional
Video Module: 1x
Video-In & 1x Video-Out
- BIOS:
VESA
BIOS 3.0 support
- API
Support: DirectX
6, DirectX 7, OpenGL
- Internal/Memory
Interface Clock: 200MHz/166MHz
- Horizontal
SYNC Signals: 31.5Hz
- 108.5Hz
- Vertical
Refresh Rate: 60Hz
- 200Hz
-
Software
drivers for Windows 95 & 98, Windows
2000, Windows NT 4.0
-
Optional
GLADIAC video-in and video-out module
available on
-
6
year service warranty
What
we have here is a very straight forward reference
design. Elsa used Infineon 6ns DDR SGRAM on
this board. There are connectors adjacent to
the GeForce2 chip that will let you install a TV
In / TV Out daughter card. The heat sink and
fan combo are also fairly standard issue hardware.
On the
other hand, I was surprised to see that the
Gladiac had almost no sign of the fact that it was
an Elsa product. We received what was
clearly a retail ready package yet, the product
itself was very "generic" looking.
The fan has a sticker on it from the actual OEM
vendor of the fan itself. After a little
investigation we were able to find out the VisionTek
is actually private labeling at least the first
round of boards for Elsa. You'll notice on
the VisionTek site, that they offer "OEM
Contract Manufacturing" services. Many
OEMs are working with this model these days.
Design the hardware and software and have the
circuit board outsourced to a "board
stuffer" for production, final assembly, test
and deployment. This is a very cost
efficient way of bringing a product to
market. It allows for dollars to be spent on
R&D versus costly capital equipment for
required added manufacturing capacity. In
addition, Elsa can also up or down scale
production builds easily with the ebb and flow of
market demand, without having wasteful empty line
capacity or shortages. We think this is a
good strategy in today's very competitive Graphics
Card market.
But
enough of the Economics and Manufacturing lesson,
you came to see what kind of 3D Thrills this new
beast can bring to your PC. Well then, it is
set up time.
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Setup,
Installation and FSAA
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